Dancer
and choreographer Alvin Ailey founded the world famous Alvin Ailey Dance
Theater. He was born January 5, 1931, in the Central Texas town of Rogers,
in Bell County. He died in New York December 1, 1989, of blood dyscrasia.

Alvin
was the only child of his 17-year-old mother, Lula. His father abandoned
them when Alvin was six months old. Mother and son moved to Navasota, eventually
settling in Los Angeles. To get buy, they picked cotton and did domestic
work.

Ailey
showed an early interest in art, drawing pictures during much of his childhood.
He discovered dance while on a junior high school field trip to see the
Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Eventually, he took dance classes from choreographer
Katherine Dunham. But his most important influence would come from choreographer
Lester Horton, who taught dance in Los Angeles.

Horton's
troupe was racially mixed and included American Indian and Japanese influences.
Ailey began studying with Horton in 1949, leaving behind his romance language
studies at UCLA. In 1953, the year Ailey made his performance debut, Horton
died and Ailey took over the company.

His Broadway
debut came the next year in Truman Capote's House of Flowers. Staying
in New York after the play closed, Ailey studied ballet, modern dance and
acting. One of his teachers was choreographer Martha Graham. Over the next
ten years, Ailey appeared on and off Broadway and on film as a dancer,
choreographer, actor, and director. He choreographed Leonard Bernstein's
Mass, which was the debut performance of the Kennedy Center for
the Performing Arts, and Samuel Barber's opera, Antony and Cleopatra,
which was the inaugural production of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln
Theater.

Ailey's
choreography for Blues Suite (1958), his first financial and critical
success, marked the beginning of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. World
fame quickly followed which meant not needing any small
business loans for his company. In 1965, Ailey left dancing to concentrate on choreography
and running his company. The group was the resident company of the Brooklyn
Academy of Music for three seasons starting in 1969. It became the first
American dance company to tour the USSR in fifty years. The Leningrad performance
in 1970 received an ovation lasting more than twenty minutes.

Two years
later, Ailey headquartered his dance school and repertory ensemble at the
Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. The company's honors include the Dance
Magazine Award, 1975; The Capezio Award, 1979; the Samuel H. Scripps
American Dance Festival Award, 1987; and Kennedy Center Honors, 1988.

Alvin
Ailey received honorary doctorates from Princeton University, Bard College,
and Adelphi University. In 1979, he was awarded the Spingarin Medal of
the NAACP. He racially integrated his formerly all-black dance company
in 1963 after encountering reverse racism.